by Stuart Scott
When Monday Night Football moved to ESPN in 2006, I was asked to cohost the ninety-minute pregame show with Chris Berman. Boomer from the studio, me in the field. Of course, no one had to ask. Monday night games have always held a special place for me. I grew up on it, getting home from football practice, scarfing down a quick meal, rushing through my homework before kickoff. Games would go so late, it wasn’t until high school that my parents let me stay up to watch the second half. I soaked it all in: Howard Cosell’s opinions, Dandy Don Meredith’s singing (“Turn out the lights, the party’s over”), and Frank Gifford’s play-by-play. Talk about iconic television; those guys broke new ground and influenced the entire country. It was appointment television. That’s why, when GQ called me the “hip-hop Howard Cosell,” I was honored.
Now here I was, same broadcast. While many saw me, as the GQ mention might have implied, as little more than a young upstart, I actually obsessively prepared for these games. On the plane that Sunday, I went over my stack of notes from around the league. I read every stat and checked out what each coach was saying about that week’s game. In live television, you don’t want any surprises.
The Steelers were coming off a disappointing overtime loss the previous week to the New York Jets, 19–16. So they’d be looking to make up for letting one slip away. Pittsburgh would be playing at home, where they were 5-0, and on Monday night—where they were undefeated in twelve appearances. I was feeling a rout coming on.
But something else was coming on, too. My stomach hurt all day. I kept feeling like I had to go to the bathroom—and I’m not talking about number one. I was in pain all night at the hotel. I wondered if it was something I ate. Some bug?
The next day, I drank tea to try to settle my stomach. I rested in my room. I even skipped my regular Monday morning workout. Nothing worked. In fact, the pain might have been getting worse. Finally, around lunchtime, I went to the hospital.
After some tests, a doctor told me I had appendicitis. “It’s best that we take it out, now,” he said.
“Can I at least go back to Connecticut and have it done there?”
He thought for a moment. “Well, it hasn’t ruptured yet,” he said. “How quickly can you get back there?”
“I’ll charter a flight right away, and I promise I’ll go straight to the hospital,” I said.
Once I had his blessing, I called ESPN and my hospital back in Connecticut. It was all set up. But what’s that I was saying about God laughing? There was a hellacious rain and lightning storm leveling the Northeast. All commercial flights were grounded. In fact, the game was being delayed. I chartered a flight and went to the FBO—a fixed-base operator, which is like a service station for private aircrafts. They told us we could take off, but that we might have to be rerouted to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
I got nothing against Wilkes-Barre, but if I was about to be cut open, Pittsburgh seemed to be the better choice. So back to the hospital I went. Late that night, I had my appendix taken out.
The next day, Kim, my ex-wife, flew in. We were still close, going so far as to take family vacations together with the kids. That morning, one of the doctors told me I should be able to go home by the next morning—Wednesday.
On Wednesday morning, though, no one came to tell me anything. Lunchtime came and went. I felt okay. I joked with a nurse: Had they forgotten about me? Bureaucracy, right?
On Wednesday evening, the doctor who had performed the surgery came into my room. “Things just got more complicated,” he said.
There was a pause. “We biopsied your appendix, and it’s cancerous.”
The word landed with a thud.
I must have looked confused. “You have cancer,” the doctor said.
I wish I could explain this moment: It’s a sledgehammer to your gut, to your chest. It’s a feeling of pressure, like you’re about to burst all over. Funny, before that moment, whenever I’d hear of someone getting diagnosed with cancer, I’d think: Oh, that’s tough, but maybe there’s medicine, maybe there’s a good chance of survival.
When it’s you, there’s zero of that. There were two thoughts that occurred to me, one right on top of the other—a lightning-fast, devastating combination:
I’m going to die.
And then, worse:
I won’t be here for my daughters.
I don’t have words for how deep and profound those two thoughts are together. But they have a physical impact. I loved the impact of hitting and being hit on the football field. This, though, hurt in a far different way: I felt it over my whole body and I couldn’t will it away.
I won’t be here for my daughters.
It was this last thought that started bouncing around my head—I couldn’t stop it. Meantime, the doc was talking. “You’re going to need more surgery,” he said. “And we’re not talking about in a few days. Really, really soon. We need to go in and take out whatever is close to your appendix. If your appendix is cancerous, there’s a good chance it’s somewhere else in that vicinity.”
He was talking about going back in first thing the next morning.
I won’t be here for my daughters.
“No, no, no,” I said. “I have to see my daughters.”
“Time is really of the essence here—” the doc said.
I won’t be here for my daughters.
“I have to see my daughters,” I said. My memory of this exchange is shaky; I may have been repeating this over and over, like a mantra. Finally, the colorectal surgeon came to confer with us, and he mentioned that he knew Dr. Jeffrey Milsom at New York–Presbyterian Hospital, whom he described as the man when it came to cases like this. A colorectal Michael Jordan, in other words. He said he’d call him.
I wish I could say I was processing this information. I just kept thinking about my girls—that I was abandoning them. Even when I was conversing with the doctors, I wasn’t really present. I wasn’t feeling fear—not yet, at least. I was numb. Most people who are diagnosed with cancer are aware of its possibility before learning they have it. They’ve undergone a test—a CT scan, a mammogram, something—that they know might bring them the news.
Not me. I was having my appendix out—only to learn of my diagnosis upon waking up. What did I know of cancer? Not much. You get it and you die. That’s what I knew—or thought I knew. Living in CancerWorld is always a touch surreal, but those first days were especially so. Time has stopped, while the world keeps swirling around you.
Within an hour, I was on the phone with Dr. Milsom. He’s a leading innovator in using high-tech, minimally invasive technologies to perform colon and rectal surgeries. The dude has published four books and more than 250 papers, presentations, and educational videos, and has been invited to perform surgery in more than fifteen countries.
But he wasn’t one of those coolly detached docs. You could tell the guy really cared. He was in his mid-fifties and spoke softly. “I honestly try to say to myself every morning,” he says in a video that’s posted online, “‘What would it be like if that were me that’s going to be that recipient of care? …’ When I’m operating on a patient, I’m thinking about their kids that are out in the waiting room. I’m saying, ‘By God, I’m going to find a way to fix this, to make this person better.’”
“Listen,” he said when we first spoke. “I’m going out of the country on Saturday. If you can get here in time, I can do the surgery on Friday and my team will care for you after that, until I get back.” There was a sense of calm and confidence in his voice.
We had a plan. I called my bosses. True to who they are, they chartered a plane for me. I was going home. Thursday night, on the eve of my surgery, the girls would come over. I still couldn’t stop thinking about them. About what I was doing to them, even though—rationally—I knew I hadn’t done anything to them. I’d have to sit them down. And I’d have to tell them. Our lives were about to change.
By the way, in a delayed start due to the weather, the Steelers beat the Dolphins 3–0 in monsoon-l
ike conditions on a late field goal. I couldn’t care less.
• • •
IN THE DAYS that followed, there were moments of confusion—how had this happened? There’s no history of cancer in my family. I didn’t live near any toxic waste dumpsites. I felt physically strong. Could I really be sick? It was hard to believe.
Once you’re told you have it, cancer is never not with you. My life was now forever divided between the before and the after of my diagnosis. I’d look at people walking by and I’d think: You don’t have cancer. It wasn’t said with envy—like I said before, I never had a Why me? moment, in part because I still felt incredibly lucky to have this life: my family, my girls, my job. No, I’d say it to myself as a simple matter of fact when I looked at another dad on the sidelines at soccer practice or when I stood in line behind an errand-running mom at Starbucks: You don’t have cancer.
Look at these people, I’d think. Eating and drinking, laughing. He’s healthy. Look how relaxed she looks. As the days turned to weeks, the weeks to months, and the months now to years of this mental and physical Kabuki dance between me and these radical cells in my body, I came to realize what I was really doing making these observations: I was noting the innocence of others. And, on some level, I was mourning my loss of the same.
I would never have that again. That carefree, total immersion in simple moments. From now on, whenever I laughed, it would no longer be an innocent laugh; it would instead be tinged with the bittersweet fear that I had only so many laughs remaining. That now there were finite numbers left to me: a finite number of laughs, of hours spent with the girls, of days.
The fear rose in me, became my constant companion. Though one of the doctors in Pittsburgh cautioned me not to, I Googled “appendiceal cancer” once I got back to the condo in Connecticut.
Awareness of different forms of cancer has grown in recent years. There’s been the pink-ribbon campaign for breast cancer and Katie Couric’s televised colonoscopy to call attention to colon cancer. But I had never heard of cancer of the appendix. Only 600 to 1,000 Americans are diagnosed with it each year. In 1993, it received a moment’s attention in the news when Audrey Hepburn passed away from it.
There are no symptoms. It’s usually discovered during the course of abdominal surgery, as in my case. About 1 percent of all appendectomies result in a cancer diagnosis. Since it usually has no symptoms, by the time it is discovered the cancer has likely spread. It has no known cause. There are no lifestyle changes you can make to avoid it.
God bless the Internet. In my job, I can pull up any stat or video clip. Remember when we were kids, we had to actually go to the library to find information? I don’t regret our 24/7 access to information. But as I sat at my kitchen table, surfing the Web, I felt my anxiety level rising. Like the initial hit of those words—“You have cancer”—I physically felt the fear building up. Let’s face it, man, there ain’t a whole lotta good stories on the Internet. With every click, I ran across another stat or another anecdote that made me feel scared, worried, anxious.
Yet I couldn’t stop clicking. I learned that 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime; 21 percent will die of the disease. Nevertheless, a report for the President’s Cancer Panel concluded that research on the environmental causes of cancer has been underfunded. As for my own type, the five-year survival rates of appendiceal cancer danced across my screen; with each one, I felt my blood pressure jump higher. Stage 1: 88%. Stage 2: 75.2%. Stage 3: 37.2%. Stage 4: 25.6%.
I pushed the laptop away, leaned back in my chair, and closed my eyes. This was wrong. The way I was feeling was … wrong. I’m in the information business. My whole professional life has been dedicated to finding stuff out and telling people about it. But the way I was feeling now had me thinking. Maybe there is such a thing as too much information, after all?
• • •
SINCE THEY WERE IN CRIBS, I’d always had adult conversations with my girls. I always leveled with them. Taelor and Sydni might have only been twelve and eight, respectively, but I thought they were ready for the most adult conversation of their young lives. As I contemplated it, I started to realize that it wasn’t just my innocence that would forever be changed.
The girls sat on my bed. Taelor seemed to sense something was wrong. I couldn’t tell if Sydni did or not. I was half lying down, wanting to show them that I was relaxed about this—but I also didn’t want to totally recline and look too fatigued.
“I’ve got cancer,” I began by saying—getting the hardest part out of the way. As I was still accepting it myself, the words sounded strange to me. Like I was playing a part. Before they could say anything, I continued.
“Listen, we’re going to fight this,” I said. “I’m going to be strong about it. We’re going to have faith, we’re going to say prayers, and I’m going to tackle this strong.”
There was a pause. “Daddy, are you going to die?” Sydni asked. I remember how wide her eyes looked.
“I could, baby girl,” I said. “But we’ve got the best doctors and I’m going to get the best medicine, and if I do everything I’m supposed to—eat right, take my medicine, rest—you ain’t getting rid of me.”
I wanted them to know that, as much as I could, I was going to make sure our lives didn’t change. “We’re going to live our life like we always do,” I said. “We’re still going to have fun. We’re still going to travel, like we always do.” In the following weeks, we’d make our annual Christmastime trip to New York, stay at the Plaza Hotel, see the Alvin Ailey dancers, go ice-skating. Between courses of chemo, we’d hop on a plane to visit Orlando and spend spring break in Arizona.
I told them I had surgery the next morning. We’d know more then about the fight we were in. They didn’t say much. They gave me hugs and kisses—which felt like medicine.
We prayed. Prayer is an interesting thing. I’m not a loud God Squad guy; when guys imply in interviews that the Lord made them juke that defender and score that touchdown, it tends to rub me wrong. I pray, but I pray for His will to be done—not mine. I acknowledge in every prayer that what I want may not be what He wants.
I know that some patients, given a cancer diagnosis, might pray to get well. That’s only natural. Some even start deal making: “God, if you let me beat this, I swear I’ll …” I’ve never once gone there: Hey, get me to remission, and I’ll start helping old ladies cross the street.
Instead, I do what we did that day I first told Taelor and Sydni I had cancer. We prayed for wisdom. We prayed for patience and a sense of calm. We prayed for the strength to handle this upcoming fight.
That’s what it was, after all: a fight. I was starting to wrap my head around that. That’s when I decided. With visions of those survival rates still flashing before my eyes, I told Dr. Milsom before the surgery: “When I wake up, I want to know what you found and what you did, but I don’t want to know what stage I’m in.”
He looked puzzled.
“With all due respect, Doc, I’m not going to be interested in how long you think I have,” I said. It took me a few days, but like an athlete who doesn’t read the sports pages in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, I was getting ready to do battle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NEVER DIE EASY
Let’s play word association. Throw the word “tough” my way and a few names instantly come to mind.
One would be Walter Payton. Yes, his nickname was Sweetness, but I always thought that missed an essential part of the guy. In fact, there was speculation that, when he got the nickname while starring at historically black Jackson State University, it was meant sarcastically—because he was such an aggressive player.
When I think of the literal definition of the word “tough”—“strong enough to withstand adverse conditions or rough or careless handling”—I wonder why we don’t just put Payton’s photo next to it. Even though I was only seven when we left Chi-town, I remember watching number 34 single-handedly take on eleven mean
mofos every Sunday. Talk about battling adverse conditions and rough handling. The Bears weren’t any good until they went to, and won, the Super Bowl in 1985, a decade into his pro career. He was the closest I’ve ever seen to a one-man team. Here’s what impressed me, even then: He wasn’t the fastest guy … he was the toughest guy.
My big bro Stephen and I paid homage to Sweetness in our youth. Remember that electric football game we all had as kids? We wore ours out. We’d actually put on our shoulder pads and play electric football. We made up a league consisting of eight teams, including the Bears, and we always made sure that our Walter Payton was the figure with the fastest green base. You know how you’d start the game and it would buzz and vibrate? Well, we instituted the Walter Payton rule. Whoever got Walter was allowed to stop the game, shut the power, and turn Walter once before resuming play. Hey, we were making the game more real because it meant you couldn’t bring him down. We kept live stats, and Payton would average over 230 yards rushing per game. My parents still have the game—even though it no longer works. It’s the one thing from our youth we haven’t let Mom throw out.
I don’t know that the meaning of Sweetness dawned on me when Stephen and I were in our shoulder pads and electrically running Payton wild back then, but I get it now: Number 34 was giving me a weekly lesson in how to stare adversity in its face. He refused to run out-of-bounds—if you were going to stop him, you had to take him down. His motto was “Never die easy,” later the title of his book.
As an adult, I’ve bonded with others in the sports world over our hero worship of Payton. Former Steelers running back Merril Hoge is a good friend of mine. We hosted a show together, Edge NFL Matchup, and he played a couple of games with me in that nine-on-nine full-contact flag-football league in Waterbury, Connecticut. Merril’s my age and also grew up a Payton fan. Early in his career as a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he approached Payton before a game against the Bears. He was so nervous, he was practically stuttering when he said: “Excuse me, Mr. Payton, I was wondering if I could just shake your hand—I’m a big fan of yours.”